When you are first starting your blog or website, the last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of money before you have an audience. Luckily, there are plenty of free and freemium tools and resources than can help you build your digital business, and scale with you as you grow.
Here’s a roundup of excellent free and freemium resources to help you start your website.
Affiliate Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means I may make a commission if you click on a link and make a purchase.
Table of Contents
Email Marketing
Growing an email list is an important part of growing your business. Why? Because it is a list of people that belongs to you, regardless of what platform you create content on. No one can take that away!
- Mailchimp
- Free up to 2,000 subscribers
- Mailerlite
- Free up to 1,000 subscribers
- ConvertKit
- Free up to 1,000 subscribers
Social Media Scheduling
Social media schedulers are one of the best automation tools for your business. Planning a great social media strategy is a deceptively difficult task, that can take hours to complete. These tools will help expedite the process.
- Later
- One account for each Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest for 30 posts per month.
- Planoly
- One Pinterest account, one Instagram account up to 30 uploads per month for free.
- Tailwind
- Free trial up to 30 Instagram posts and 100 Pinterest posts.
Graphic Design & Photo Editing
- Canva
- You can create stunning graphics and content even with their free plan.
- Photopea
- A Photoshop dupe.
- Background Burner
- Remove the backgrounds from your images.
- TinyPNG
- Make your big images smaller without losing quality. This is important for your site to run quickly!
- Pixlr
- Edit, crop, filter your pictures with this online tool.
Graphics & Creative Assets
- Creative Market
- Creative Market is one of my favorite places to find design assets. Every week, you can get up to six free goods, which could be presentation templates, fonts, and design elements!
- DrawKit
- DrawKit has great, modern illustrations that are updated weekly, and relevant to current affairs. Not only can you get free illustrations, but there are also icon and animation packs.
- Humaans
- Humaans is free, well-known library of customizable – you guessed it – humans.
- Absurd Design
- Absurd Design features surreal designs if you are looking for illustrations to get weird.
- Undraw
- Undraw is another great illustration library that allows you to customize the illustrations with one of your own brand colors.
- Open Peeps
- Open Peeps is a customizable library of people, with character options that allow you to be inclusive and diverse.
- Illustrations
- The content of Illustrations really spans the gamut, and has more youthful, colorful vibes than some of the other illustration libraries.
- Many Pixels
- While Many Pixels has a premium option, the free illustration library allows you customize illustrations with your brand color.
- Free Pik
- Free Pik has all of the things – vectors, illustrations, stock photos and more.
- Web Designer Depot Freebies
- The freebies on this site range from fonts, to illustrations, icon packs to mock-ups.
Fonts
- 1001 Fonts
- 1001 Fonts has way more than 1001 free fonts to download. Not all of the fonts are free for commercial use though, so be sure to double check the license if you plan to use the font for your logo or business.
- Font Squirrel
- Font Squirrel bills themselves as 100% free fonts for commercial use, which makes it easier to find what you’re looking for and not worry about the licensing.
- Font Joy
- Finding fonts that work well together can be tricky, but this tool helps take the guesswork out of it. Ideal for helping you find great font pairings for the headings and body copy of your website.
- Google Fonts
- Google fonts are free fonts that you can use on your website with the potential to speed up your site based on how the files are stored and served. According to the Google Fonts About page, Google’s “servers will automatically send the smallest possible file to every user based on the technologies that their browser supports.”
- Font Pair
- Font Pair is another tool to help you find fonts that work well together, with this site focusing on Google Font pairings.
If you want to some more font inspo, check out my posts on my favorite free and premium Art Nouveau and Art Deco fonts.
Stock Photography
For more information on each of these sites and to see examples of the sort of photos you can find there, check out my post on the Best Free Stock Photo Sites.
- Pexels
- Nappy.co
- Gratisography
- Unsplash
- Picnoi
Color Palettes
- Coolors
- Play around and generate your own color palette.
- Canva Color Wheel
- Learn color theory and find complementary, monochromatic, analogous and more color pairings.
- Colormind
- An AI color palette generator.
- Colors by Muzli
- Find color inspo and see your color choices in a live UI demo.
- Color Hunt
- Color Hunt is a good place to find premade palettes for inspo.
- Adobe Color
- Adobe Color is a powerful, multi-feature tool that can help you find color palettes using a color wheel, extract color palettes from an image, and more.
- Accessible Brand Colors by Use All Five
- This is one of my favorite accessibility checkers to use to ensure brand colors meet WCAG color contrast standards.
Screen Recording & Video Tools
- Loom
- Loom can record your screen and you at the same time, making it ideal for personalized help videos or short tutorial videos.
- Giphy Capture
- Record your screen and turn it in to gifs with the Giphy Capture app.
- Powtoon
- Powtoon’s free version allows you to make animated videos up to three minutes.
- Moovly
- Even with the free version, you can access Moovly’s library of over 1 million free stock assets to create videos with.
Analytics, SEO, Keyword Research
- Also Asked
- This tool uses “people also asked” data to help you find long-tail keywords and questions based on a keyword term, language, and region.
- Keyword Surfer
- Keyword Surfer is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to see keyword search volumes right on your Google search results page.
- Answer the Public
- This is a great tool for gathering content ideas. Enter 1-2 words to generate a list of who, what, when, where, why etc. questions people are asking about the topic. Use your expertise to answer the questions on your blog.
- Google Trends
- Enter a keyword to learn the Google trends for that term, such as interest over time, interest by region, and related search queries.
- Moz Free SEO Tools
- One of the top SEO companies out there, this library of free SEO tools include a keyword searcher, a link search, a domain analysis, and more.
- Exploding Topics
- Exploding Topics is relatively new tool that helps to identify keywords that are growing in popularity before they take off. It provides good insight into what may be popular, providing you with the potential to be one-step ahead of the curve.
- Ubersuggest
- Ubersuggest provides competitor research, keyword research, content ideas, and more.
- Keyword Tool
- Keyword Tool allows you to do keyword research not just for Google, but also analyze keywords for YouTube, Amazon, eBay, and more.
- Google Analytics
- Google Analytics is the industry standard free tool that provides the most important data for your site.
Business Help
- Wave
- A tool to help you manage the financial side of your business, their free package includes accounting, invoicing, and receipt scanning capabilities.
- Dubsado
- Dubsado is a business management tool that includes features such as scheduling, client management, contract and form creation, and more.
- Termly
- Termly provides free legal templates up to 100 visitors a month.
- Shopify Privacy Policy Generator
- Every site should have a privacy policy page to operate legally and avoid headaches down the road, and this tool by Shopify makes it easier to get one.
Productivity/Organization
- Trello
- Trello is an organizational tool that can help you organize all of your to-dos on a board, making it easy and satisfying to make a list and check things off.
- Todoist
- If cards and boards don’t help you, Todoist provides you more with a traditional list set-up to make your to-do lists.
- Zapier
- Zapier is a tool that helps you connect different platforms to create an automatic “zap” that helps you streamline your processes.
- Taskade
- Another organization and collaboration tool, Taskade has a lot of great templates to help your organize your lists and goals.
- Markup.io
- Markup is a feedback tool that allows you to upload a URL or an image, make notes on it, and send it to someone in order to share your feedback.
What Do You Use?
I hope this list helps you. What are some of your favorite free and freemium resources that helped you launch your website? Let me know in the comments!
As always, thanks for reading Domains and Champagne!
Leave a Reply